Alaska is now 50 years old and no matter what has happened over the first 49 years, we got more attention in the last year than we had for some time--Sarah Palin, Ted Stevens, Mark Begich. It may have been 15 below this morning (or 50 below, depending on where you live), but Alaska's been a hot topic for a while...and with Palin and her extended family in the news, we'll probably be pretty hot for a few more months.
I've only been up in AK a little over a decade and I've grown accustomed to some quirkiness to our politics and our economic system and our cultural issues. It's a state where it seems everyone is "from somewhere else" and everyone "has a reason" for wanting to live up here...perhaps they are running from something or still wanting to strike it rich on some venture.
The Anchorage Daily News has a good editorial about Alaska's history as a state, wrapping it around the oil business and the pipeline. Please read it.
The article does a good job with expressing some of the key components of the Alaskan cultural environment.
- We're skeptical of "outsiders." In fact, if you're not from Alaska, you're called an Outsider. And when Alaskans leave the state they say they are going "outside." There's a reason why this is a state that can have and "Alaskan Independence Party" and really not bat an eye. But there are some particular "outsiders" who make up the bulk of our discussion...
Nonetheless, environmentalists and the feds remain the prime objects of some Alaskans' scorn. Left alone to decide the matters, Alaskans today would almost certainly embrace drilling in the environmentally sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
- We owe our soul to oil. It's been good to us and it may be our downfall.
In moving from fish to oil, Alaska traded one set of Outside colonial powers for another. Instead of Seattle canneries running the show in the territorial Legislature, oil companies carried the big clout in Juneau.
In 1981, the industry's allies rolled back the state's first effort to gain its fair share from windfall oil profits. After a modest tax increase in 1989, prompted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the industry won almost two decades of tax stability at rates far below what other oil-rich provinces in the world managed to collect.
With Big Oil's influence came corruption. But you already knew about a bunch of that. We've heard "Uncle Ted's" name in the paper enough over the last few months to become aware of what this influx of cash and influence has meant.
- We are exceptionally dependent upon the Federal Government, even as we give our residents cash (Permanent Fund Dividend) every year just for being here. This means that, with oil prices dropping, alternative fuels around the corner, and Uncle Ted gone, our financial future is kind of a question mark.
There's a lot more in the editorial and it serves as a pretty good summary.
I remember hearing about Alaskan economics shortly after moving up here to get out of the midwest. A professor at Alaska Pacific University said that there are several watershed events in the economic history of Alaska. I think they were the following:
- The Russian Fur Trade --Brought Russian Orthodoxy and an development boom
- The Gold Rush
- WWII -- Many of the "old-timers" up here came up at this time and stayed with the promise of land and development.
- The Oil Pipeline (natch)
- The Box Stores -- This one surprised me. But the professor said that it used to be that folks had to can foods, live off the land, or make frequent trips to Anchorage for foodstuffs. The box stores (COSTCO, SAMS, etc.) meant that people could stock up on bulk foods. Now folks from the villages come to these stores and have bulk items shipped back to their villages. It changed how goods are shipped. It also means that the kids can recognize the "COSTCO coat" at school since everybody has one.
Anyway, Alaska is an interesting state and our recent venture into the national spotlight has made us a topic of discussion around watercoolers and blogs.
For more (much more) on Alaskan politics, make sure you check out the people over at The Mudflats. That site has been (and continues to be) a valuable source of information for many of us up here.